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  12        <a href="">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
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  20   <div class="title">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</div>
  21   <div class="date">2009-03-30 11:50</div>
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  23 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
  24 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
  25 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
  26 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
  27 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
  28 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
  29 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
  30 application.</p>
  31
  32 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
  33 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
  34 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
  35 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
  36 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
  37 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
  38 blocked from doing so.</p>
  39
  40 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
  41 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
  42 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
  43 requirements change.</p>
  44
  45 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
  46 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
  47 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
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  50   <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="tags/english">english</a>, <a href="tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="tags/standard">standard</a>.</div>
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